Horseshoe

A single horseshoe, lying where it was left on the floorboards of a slab cottage somewhere in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The iron is thick with rust, the boards beneath it worn and grimy, the whole scene photographed in 2020 by Brett Patman as part of an 18-image series documenting a building around 130 years old. The cottage was constructed around 1890, built in the colonial vernacular style from split hardwood timber, the same slab construction method that selectors across the Tablelands used from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Dense, locally hewn, and close to the ground, slab huts of this era used eucalypt species such as ironbark, stringybark, or blackbutt, fitted into mortised grooves or stacked between grooved posts. A basic structure could be raised in a few weeks by a capable selector working with what the land provided. For generations the building served as a family home. A photograph taken around 1920 shows two young boys at the entrance, the same slab walls visible behind them that stand today. At some point after the mid-twentieth century, the end wall containing the original chimney was removed and replaced with large doors, converting the cottage to shed use. The domestic fittings remained: a hardwood washstand with ornate brass drop handles, counter scales coated in dust, a hanging scale with a frozen dial, animal traps, a wireless set, and this horseshoe. The building outlasted a larger, newer family home constructed nearby in the early 1900s. That structure was destroyed during the 1964-65 fire season, one of the most destructive in NSW history, when fires burned 530,000 hectares across the Southern Tablelands and Snowy Mountains. The slab cottage survived. The family and the property's location remain anonymous at the owner's request. The horseshoe records where it was placed, and where it was found.